After a painstaking analysis of the intelligence, the Nidher supreme commander reached a conclusion.
This was an all-out offensive, comparable in scale to the massive invasion eleven millennia ago.
The Nidher were a weathered race. The Imperium's Great Crusade had been one of the few periods that drove them to despair. Masters of concealment and ambush, they had once rallied their entire race to destroy an invading fleet, only to discover that it was merely the enemy's Vanguard Reconnaissance Force.
Overwhelming numbers of powerful warships, carrying crazed warriors of extraordinary individual strength, had slaughtered almost their entire fleet.
More and more agricultural planets had been ruthlessly purged, forcing them to retreat to their homeworld. Fortunately, the enemy had never found them.
The Necrons' null zone had worked. Warp routes simply did not exist here; there was only emptiness.
No Warp Engine could tear open a warp rift in such a region, so the Night Lords Legion's forces had never found the Nidher's final refuge.
They had hidden for a long time, a very long time, until one brave soul ventured out from their resource-starved homeworld again and discovered that the balance of power had changed dramatically.
The mighty enemy that had once plagued them now existed only in scattered, small detachments. Attacking them no longer risked retaliation from an enormous fleet. Many powerful neighboring races had been exterminated, their territories occupied by a bunch of "friendly" green mushrooms.
In the Ghoul Stars, Orks counted as a "friendly" species.
The Nid Heller were delighted. By now, they no longer feared the super-fleets recorded by their ancestors. Military geniuses born of rapid development and fierce struggle reviewed those battles, learning from and surpassing the Astartes, convinced they fully understood their enemy's fighting methods.
Under cover, ninety-six groups of Nidher warships crept forward,